


Vergeet niet te flossen

by ToBebbanburg



Category: Pak van mijn Hart, The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Crack, Crack Fic, Dentists, Drabble, M/M, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29158674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToBebbanburg/pseuds/ToBebbanburg
Summary: Joe and Nicky’s peaceful lives are disturbed by the arrival of a dentist who looks uncannily like Joe...
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 31
Kudos: 70
Collections: Richard. The Dentist.





	Vergeet niet te flossen

**Author's Note:**

> The discord made me do this.  
> It’s adjacent to my Ink & Ivy AU where Joe is a tattoo artist and Nicky owns a florists/cafe; I can’t make Richard canon in my AU. Not yet.

“I don’t like it,” Joe said. “It’s unsettling.”

“ _It_ has a name,” Nicky chastised. “And yes he is a little unsettling, but I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice man.”

_It_ in question was a man who resembled Joe in a way that went beyond a passing similarity and straight into unsettling territory. The man looked like Joe but _wrong_ : he had no beard, no fashion sense, and his hair... his hair looked like it had a mind of its own.

“He really doesn’t look that much like you,” Nicky soothed. “I would never have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out.”

“Hmph,” Joe snorted. Of course, Nicky had never seen him without his beard, and so perhaps that was why he couldn’t see the similarities between Joe and his almost definitely evil twin. A sense of dread began to build in Joe’s stomach as the man started to make his way over to them, the brown of his jacket a hideous camouflage against the soil and bark of the florists’. Who knew how long he’d been lurking here, hiding amongst the compost?

“Hi,” the man said. “I wonder if you could help me pick out some plants for my work?”

Oh god. He was _Dutch_. That was much too close for comfort.

“Of course.”

Joe’s polite, perfect and professional Nicky actually _smiled_ at the imposter, seemingly unperturbed by the beige turtleneck that threatened to swallow the man’s entire head.

“What sort of thing are you after? Something to brighten the place up? Or something to raise those oxygen levels? I know offices can get quite stuffy.” Nicky chattered away to the man as though he was a normal customer, and not a strange creature cloned from one of Joe’s beard trimmings.

“Well I’m a dentist, so I think something big and colourful to distract patients as I pull their teeth out,” the man said, then quickly followed with a throaty chuckle and added: “I’m joking, of course. We have drugs for that.”

To Joe’s absolute horror, Nicky laughed.

“I think I can find something suitable,” he said.

“How about a Venus flytrap?” Joe offered. Nicky narrowed his eyes at him.

“Don’t you have your own shop to run?” he asked. Joe shrugged. He didn’t have any clients booked in today.

“Oh, what do you do?” the beige man asked Joe.

“I have a tattoo parlour,” Joe said reluctantly. The man really got under his skin, and he wasn’t sure exactly _why_.

“Ah, a fellow needle man,” the man chuckled again. It made Joe never want to pick up his tattoo gun ever again.

“Yes. Well. I’m going to head back then. To my needles.” Joe pressed a kiss to Nicky’s lips and left the shop, trying very hard not to shudder as he did so.

*****

The bell above Joe’s shop door tinkled and he looked up from his sketching. His heart plummeted. It was the man.

“Hi!” the man said cheerfully, strolling into Joe’s shop with a disturbing nonchalance. “Do you take walk-ins? I’ve always fancied a tattoo.”

Joe reluctantly said that yes, he did indeed take walk-ins, and would the man like to take a seat?

The man, he soon found out, was called Richard, and whilst buying various plants to distract his patients with had clearly been on the receiving end of Nicky gushing about Joe’s artistic prowess. Any other time Joe would be both proud and happy that Nicky had swayed his customers so easily. Now though...

“So wait, you want some text done _where_?” Joe wasn’t sure what he just heard. No, he _was_ sure what he just heard, he just didn’t like it.

“On the small of my back. Just here.” Richard lifted his jacket up and gestured to a location that Joe could only describe as being “ass antlers”.

“And I want it to say “Vergeet niet te flossen”,” Richard continued. “It means-“

“Don’t forget to floss, yeah. I grew up in The Netherlands,” Joe said. Richard beamed. Joe felt sick.

“How wonderful! Whereabouts?”

“We moved about.” Joe didn’t feel like giving Richard any more personal information than necessary. “Any embellishments you’d like, any special fonts?” he asked, trying to get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible.

Richard grinned, showing of a disturbing amount of teeth.

“Oh yes,” he said, “I want the text itself to look like floss.”

*****

“That was the single worst thing I’ve ever had to tattoo,” Joe said as he fell into bed besides Nicky. “And I’ve had to tattoo some _terrible_ things.”

“It’s a little strange, for sure, but it was just writing,” Nicky snorted.

“He wanted it to look like floss. My laptop now has floss in its search history.”

“You can delete that,” Nicky murmured as he snuggled under the duvet, already closing his eyes.

“I can’t delete it from my mind,” Joe said darkly. “I’m never flossing again.”

“Joe if you don’t look after your teeth, you’ll have to go to the dentist,” Nicky warned. Somehow, he’d picked up the same firm but reasonable tone from Joe’s mother, and clearly wasn’t afraid to use it.

“Urgh. You’re right.” Joe turned his bedside light off. “But I won’t like it.”

“You don’t have to.” Nicky patted Joe’s hand consolingly, then kissed him on his cheek.

“Goodnight Joe. Vergeet niet te flossen.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you too appreciate Richard in all his beige-ness, find me on tumblr @tobebbanburg


End file.
